Pneumatic equipment is often used in various fields of industry, particularly in the areas of mining and resource extraction. Typically, pneumatically driven equipment is supplied with compressed air from a pneumatic pump via a long pneumatic hose. Occasionally, a pneumatic tool may accidentally decouple from the pneumatic hose or the hole itself may rupture. Air rushing through the open end of the hose can cause the hose to whip and flail violently, thus posing a serious danger to operators and other personnel working near the rupture point who can be seriously physically injured by the flailing pneumatic hose.
A hose rupture valve located upstream of the rupture point acts to prevent the flailing of the ruptured hose by stopping, or at least greatly slowing, the outflow of air. To date, however, hose rupture valves have been both expensive to purchase and cumbersome to operate. Several prior-art hose rupture valves required the pressure source to be shut down and the pneumatic fluid bled away before the hose could be reconnected or repaired so that normal operations can resume. Other prior-art hose rupture valves, while permitting a limited flow of fluid through the valve after the rupture of the hose, were very complicated to build and thus expensive to purchase.
Applicant's earlier U.S. Pat. No. 5,004,010 entitled HOSE RUPTURE VALVE, which issued to Wilfred Huet on Apr. 2, 1991, disclosed a hose rupture valve for preventing excessive and dangerous flow of fluid through a high pressure hose when the hose is ruptured or the pneumatic tool connected thereto is accidentally decoupled downstream of the valve. The hose rupture valve included a housing containing a cylinder having a pivotally mounted “vane” (i.e. a pivotally mounted flap). During normal operation, the vane would be held open by a spring. If the hose downstream of the valve were ruptured or accidentally decoupled from the pneumatic tool, the pressure within the cylinder would suddenly decrease relative to the pressure within the housing, causing the vane to pivot into a closed position to prevent the excessive flow of fluid through the outlet port of the valve. Although this hose rupture valve functioned very well, further improvements to the design, particularly to simplify manufacturability, would be highly desirable.